Hosea and Debbie go to Scotland

So, … how did the relationship fare, between us, while we were together in Scotland for two weeks? The short answer is, I think it was fine. On the one hand, we didn't fight. In the other direction, we didn't fuck. We kissed occasionally, but always with closed mouths. All the guidelines that I promised Marie we would observe, we observed.

But if you want the full flavor of the trip, … maybe I need to talk just a little longer to describe it.

In the first place, everyone treated us naturally as a couple. Waiters and innkeepers routinely referred to Debbie (when speaking to me) as "your wife." All our lodgings except for Glasgow had been booked in her name; on the days that I arrived before she did and checked us in, I was always addressed as "Mr. Debbie"—even when I signed the register as "Hosea Tanatu," nobody batted an eye. We always had separate twin beds, but so what? Some couples do that.

Specific events stand out. When we had dinner in Balmaha, after I came nearly to ruin on the slopes of Conic Hill, I was ready to give up the trip then and there. To reassure me, Debbie looked at me earnestly and said, "I love you."

"I love you too, Debbie."

We worked out a modified plan, where I did some walking and some resting, but then we talked about other things. We talked about the nature of our love for each other, and distinguished between "romance" (implicitly including sex) and "soul-to-soul communication." I told Debbie that for us, we don't need the romance. Partly this is for practical reasons (because romantically I am already tied to Marie). But more fundamentally, the job of the romance is to build a permanent connection between two people, and that work has already been done for us! I told her that I didn't know whether there really are such things as past lives, but our relationship is as if we had known each other in (one or more) past lives because we got so close so quickly, even when we were just work colleagues and carefully kept it at that level.

During this conversation, she said that she was very glad I had Marie in my life.

So we established that we love each other, and that sex is for sure not part of the picture. What else? Well, … there were just a variety of moments.

The night we spent in Drymen, Debbie was sick much of the time. She thinks there must have been some gluten in the tiny bit of whisky she sampled at the Glengoyne Distillery. She didn't let me help her any, but she reported to me that the illness had caused her a spot of incontinence, which of course embarrassed her no end. On the other hand, that's not the kind of thing you can share with anyone without being close. So it contributed, in an odd way, to the air of "coupledom" about us.

I told you about our getting drinks at the Tyndrum Inn, the evening of Day 6. We had a fun conversation with a few locals whose table we were sharing, and when they found out about our anomalous relationship they had a number of questions. But one thing they kept coming back to was to say that we really looked like a couple. Now at first I had trouble understanding why, because we weren't doing any of the cute things that you see couples do in public: no little kisses, no touching, no torrid glances. No cuddling, no cooing. But in retrospect, I actually think that was part of it, or at any rate I think that's why they read us unfailingly as man and wife. After all, in nearly any other circumstance where a man and a woman are interacting one-on-one, if they are both straight and both past the age of puberty there is some kind of sexual energy in the air. They may play into it or they may ignore it, but it is almost always there. And if that sexual energy is missing, the most common reason is that it has burned itself out: in other words, that you are looking at a couple who have been married long enough that the sexual energy has had a home to go to for many years, where it burned steadily from a great blaze down to embers. I asked Debbie her opinion later, and she agreed completely that that must have been what they saw, and why they read it the way they did. 

On our rest day in Glencoe (Day 8), after we finished breakfast and were walking back to our room, I teased Debbie about something. She laughed and caught me around the waist for a kiss; I put my hand behind her head. But it was a very light, gentle kiss.

The evening of Day 9, while we were having dinner in Kinlochleven, Debbie said that she was really enjoying the solitary hiking, because she found it a meditative experience, a kind of Noble Silence. I told her that I've had a similar experience while sitting and waiting—not always, because sometimes the chatter in my mind is too strong. But occasionally I can quiet my mind, feel the breeze, and listen to the birds chirp or the water gurgle. And it has been genuinely lovely. I suppose in one way it is a good thing that my phone crapped out on me back on Day 5, because it meant that I had no electronic distractions in these moments.

She also explained that the reason it was so important to her to complete this walk—and some others she has planned for the future—is that she wants to squeeze as much adventure as possible into her life before she is too old and feeble to do it any more. This is something I probably ought to think about: what do I want to accomplish before I'm done with this life? Right now I don't know.

When we were walking around Glasgow (Days 11, 12, and 13) we started holding hands. Not all the time. But Glasgow was crowded, and sometimes it was difficult to tell which way to go or whether it was safe to cross the street just now, and so we fell into it as an occasional thing, when it was useful or convenient but not always. But I was keenly aware of it, when we did. (See also my remarks about hand-holding here and here.) 

Those are the notes I kept during the trip about the relationship energy. In some ways it really was very intimate. In other ways, we carefully observed a few strict boundaries. (In a day or two I'll write about "Challenges to modesty." That should be funny.) So it was a little anomalous. I guess I already used that word, didn't I?